maandag 4 maart 2013

Open Source, Czech Republic Style

During the last weekend of Februari I was fortunate enough to attend the Devconf conference in Brno in the Czech Republic. I set out not knowing what kind of event to expect but it turned out to be a fine conference with an attendance of about 500 people covering a plethora of open source subjects. The event took place on the campus of the department of informatics of the Brno university so it felt a bit like the little sibling of the FOSDEM conference in Brussels.

Dinner in a church?

I arrived on Friday afternoon and later in the evening I hooked up with some of the colleagues for dinner. Particular about that meal was that the place where we took it was situated in a former church! I was given the address of the place but nevertheless walked past it twice… Who would think of a restaurant in a building that is a church? ;-)

The restaurant in the church.

In case you wonder, the picture is from a long time ago

so Czech people have modern cars right now ;-)

Busy Saturday

On Saturday I had to deliver a Forge talk on how to raise your productivity writing Java EE applications and a lightning talk on how to create a web application in the cloud by reverse engineering a database. Both talks were received well and had a fair number of attendees.

Mike Bonnet (l.) and myself (r.) tasting Czech beer

In the evening the organizers had organized a party in a club close to the conference venue. There was an abundance of food and drinks but I had to keep my manners as I needed to host a Forge plug-in writing lab on Sunday morning.

Hacking, hacking, hacking...

Thanks to Pavol Slegr who had made sure that all the needed software was installed on the machines in the lab room this lab was also a big success. All the attendees were able to successfully create a Forge plug-in for Hibernate Envers. I know that some of them were going to use this knowledge immediately to create a plug-in for the technology they were working with. I'm already impatient to see the results of their work appear in the Forge plug-in repository.

On Monday morning I went to our Brno office for a couple of hours to continue these talks with the Arquillian team but by the early afternoon I was already back on my way out to catch the flight back home. It has been a very tiring but fun and interesting weekend. Congratulations again to the organizers of the event!

Cheers,

Koen

P.S. The recording of the Forge session has been made available on Youtube.